Hospital campuses are growing and expanding to accommodate the demand for quality patient care. As a result, it is becoming very common for healthcare professionals to travel considerable distances to get from their office in one building to hospital rooms in another, or to yet another building for clinical consultations. Such traveling from place to place can take a significant amount of time. While the use of existing personal mobility devices helps to reduce the time required to move between two places, it does not completely eliminate it. Thus, even with existing personal mobility devices, the amount of travel time can still account for a significant portion of a doctor's day.
This increase in the amount of time doctors must spend traveling between different locations means doctors have less time to review the information they need to treat their patients and less time to address the calls, pages, e-mails, faxes, etc. they are bombarded with each day. Moreover, as the amount of time a doctor spends traveling each day increases, it becomes increasingly more likely that doctors will be called upon to address urgent situations while they are traveling. But in order to adequately address these situations, doctors may sometimes need to review vital patient information. However, doctors generally are unable to acquire such information while they are traveling. Currently, the best way for a doctor to access the patient information needed to address a certain matter is either to find an unoccupied workstation in the hospital enterprise or to travel back to the office. Both of these options increase the total amount of travel time, and neither of them allow a doctor to respond in a timely fashion. Accordingly, there is a need for a personal mobility device that allows doctors (as well as other people in similar situations) to make efficient use of the increasing amount of time they are traveling. There is also a need for a personal mobility device that allows doctors to quickly access clinical information while traveling between different locations.
Generally, a person's arms and hands must be used to operate a personal mobility device. For example, the use of a person's hands and arms may be required to steer the personal mobility device and possibly to control the throttle. Thus, the ability to utilize the driver's hands and arms for other purposes, such as accessing patient information or receiving phone calls from a cellular phone, is limited. While the driver's hands can be freed up by pulling over and stopping the personal mobility device, doing so only increases the time it takes to get to the desired location. Accordingly, there is a further need for a personal mobility device that allows a doctor to receive phone calls and to access needed information without substantially interfering with the doctor's ability to operate the personal mobility device.